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‘Smile’ and Other Difficulties

Van Dyke Parks at his home in Pasadena, Calif. “Art is meant to illuminate,” he said, “not just to decorate.”Credit
Emily Berl for The New York Times

It is a quaintly old-fashioned idea, but it suits Van Dyke Parks perfectly. Partly to celebrate his 70th birthday, and partly because he has not released an album of his own in nearly two decades (he has, instead, been producing other musicians’ discs and writing film music), Mr. Parks built his new “Songs Cycled” CD from tracks he has released on 7-inch singles in recent years. In a way the compilation recalls the albums of the 78 r.p.m. days, which often collected five or six singles between cardboard covers.

The set glances backward in other ways, too. Its title alludes to “Song Cycle,” Mr. Parks’s 1968 debut — a sophisticated, richly orchestrated album steeped in classical and theatrical influences.

Mr. Parks had, by then, worked as an arranger and producer, performed briefly with Frank Zappa’s Mothers of Invention and collaborated with Brian Wilson on songs for the Beach Boys’ “Smile” album. That 1967 project was shelved when Mr. Wilson had a nervous breakdown (and in the face of the other Beach Boys’ opposition to Mr. Wilson’s experimental music and Mr. Parks’s poetic, often mystical lyrics). That left fans to speculate about its contents and running order until Mr. Wilson released a completed version in 2004.

Mr. Parks released five more studio albums — including “Orange Crate Art,” a 1995 rematch with Mr. Wilson — all stylistically wide-ranging and vividly orchestrated, but devoted himself mainly to arranging and production.

Q. You canceled a performance in Brooklyn recently because of a hand injury. What happened?

A. It’s terrible, but the thing is, I play with great velocity. But now I’m 70, and with age the tendons get bigger and more constrictive with the fluid that instructs their movements, and that leads to trigger finger. The last time it happened I had a cortisone injection, but you can’t keep shooting yourself with cortisone, so I’ve made the painful decision to have surgery. The piano has been my life. Almost every day I run through some Bach — a day without Bach is a barren day — and now I’m working on some Albéniz and Granados.

Q. You studied classical music formally, didn’t you?

A. Yes. In 1952 I went to the Columbus Boychoir boarding school, near Princeton, and that same year I was on the stage at the Metropolitan Opera, with Victoria de los Angeles — I was an urchin in “La Bohème.” Our choir worked with Beecham, Ormandy, Mitropoulos, Walter, Toscanini — all of them. I had an immersion in legitimate music that is absolutely indescribable in its abundance and opportunity. Now I’m caught in no man’s land. I’m not “legitimate” because I lie down with dogs. And yet, doggone it, I’m not a rocker because I work with a premeditated intent. So I’m not really at home in either camp, but I’m at home between them.

Q. Now young classical composers are writing for rock instrumentation and indie-rock musicians are embracing classical structures. You were doing that on “Song Cycle” in 1968.

A. The classical players have lost that hauteur, because it didn’t work. And the powers of deception that I used back then are still alive. The music that I studied, which took me into popular music, was anxious music. That was what I was trying to escape. I mean, when I was 12 I was singing “Pierrot Lunaire.” I met Schoenberg, I knew about this stuff. And I decided that what was really more satisfying to me was the durability of melody. I wanted to recapture melody as the through line for the dramas that would unfold lyrically.

Q. At the time you made “Song Cycle,” were you already working at Warner Brothers as a producer?

A. Well, Warner hired me because they thought I was a “solution,” in a bifurcated way — first of all, as a musician who had enormous studio experience. When I went into the music business, in 1963, my first union job was as an arranger on “The Bare Necessities,” for Disney. I soon became adjunctive to other people’s search for fame and fortune. Also, by 1967 I had been through eight months of Beach Boys experience — or Brian Wilson, really, with one short conversation with one or two of the other Beach Boys. I left that job in the shambles that became so famous. It became a pioneering event for interactive record design.

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Q. Are you referring to the fact that fans, using bootlegged outtakes, have been assembling their own reconstructions of “Smile” for the last few decades?

A. Yes, bootleggery. My opportunity at Warner Brothers came specifically from the fact that I had worked with Brian Wilson, and carried what they might have thought was a Rosetta stone to Brian’s thinking. I don’t think it’s sinister to suspect that they wanted to learn what Brian Wilson knew, because he was the most powerful commercial success as a singer and songwriter in the industry then.

A. When I played the album for Joe Smith, the president of the label, there was a stunned silence. Joe looked up and said, “Song Cycle”? I said, “Yes,” and he said, “So, where are the songs?” And I knew that was the beginning of the end. Warner held the album for a year. Then I met Jac Holzman [who ran Elektra Records], and after he listened to it, he went to Warner Brothers and said, “If you folks aren’t going to release this album, I will — how much do you want for it?” So they decided to put it out, grudgingly.

Q. “Songs Cycled” began as a series of vinyl singles, released on your own label, Bananastan, but you’re releasing the album on the British Bella Union label (distributed by Yep Roc in the United States). How did that happen?

A. I went everywhere to get a contract, to find a patron. But I couldn’t [have sex] in a women’s penitentiary with a fist full of pardons in the United States. I think it’s because I bring a degree of skepticism to my work that makes it truly unbrandable. And branding is what it’s all about.

Q. You’ve drawn on your past work on “Songs Cycled,” with new versions of “The All Golden” from “Song Cycle” and “Hold Back Time” from “Orange Crate Art,” and the Esso Trinidad Steel Band’s recording of Saint-Saëns’s “Aquarium,” from an album you produced in 1971. Here you’ve linked that track to the newer “Black Gold,” about an oil spill, and it is one of several songs that deal with political and social issues, including the Iraq war, greed on Wall Street, the Sept. 11 attacks.

A. That was a time when the eco-sensibility that had been fostered by the Transcendentalists was being espoused by the counterculture, and I had been reading a lot about the coming of this thing called eco-consciousness. In 1969 we had the first big oil spill in California, and I started to think that it might be a concomitant obligation to infuse my work with some kind of recognition of such things. And when I saw this steel band playing on oil drums I put two and three together, and we recorded Saint-Saëns. They were such a great group, and that record sank without a trace. I wrote “Black Gold,” the song that follows it, after I read about the Prestige, a big tanker with a single hull that fractured and went down off the Bay of Biscay. It just angered me so much. I stopped thinking of anger as a sin, and started thinking of it as a motivator to something that might bring us some remedial strength, and that might move people to make songs once again look like the political tools that they should be. Art is meant to illuminate, not just to decorate. I know it sounds highfalutin, but as I go into my eighth decade, I’m hounded by these darkening times.

Q. On the other hand, the album has lighter things, like Billy Edd Wheeler’s “Sassafrass,” and the folksier “Missin’ Missippi” and “Amazing Graces.”

A. “Sassafrass” is a tribute to Spike Jones if ever there was one, and Billy Ed Wheeler, who is my favorite songwriting exponent of Appalachia, he is the guy. But I often get into trouble because of the disparate elements within a collective work.

Q. Is that supposed to be a bad thing?

A. Well, it is now, you see. The brain police have decided it’s bad. But this is what I found so oxygenating about the Beat era. When I walked into a coffeehouse, eclecticism was not a big word. It was good to be interested in a whole bunch of stuff. Audiences embraced it. Audiences were jolted by it. They did not resent it. They didn’t need to be told what to think. I’m not prepared to tell people what to think. I may leave more questions than answers. I believe that anything worth its salt in the arts must create a wobble. We are not polestars We are here struggling in the dynamics of justice, between the absolutism of faith and reasonable doubt. That’s what I want my work to do.

A version of this article appears in print on July 23, 2013, on Page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: ‘Smile’ And Other Difficulties. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe